“There wasn’t much need of management,” answered Haydock. “The First Seven is so dazzled by its own general brilliancy that it firmly believes that when it was elected, the list of really interesting men in the class was exhausted. So it goes in for proposing its personal friends who are congenial, without being ‘clever’ and ‘literary;’ and as nobody will vote for anybody else’s friends, they all get tired of black-balling people after a while, and compromise on some obscure and very deserving person none of them know at all. It was when everybody was tired of fighting, that I bucked in McGaw. I said he was a scholar,--he must be if he’s able to make you pass examinations; and I said that we would be keeping up the Signet’s tradition of electing representative men, if we got him in; and that the Faculty would like it; and that McGaw would give just the necessary tone of seriousness to the Signet that I feared we of the First Seven lacked. I said that, because people are always tickled to death to think they belong to something very serious, without being serious themselves. It was the speech of my life, I assure you. McGaw was elected, on the second ballot, without a murmur.” “You’ll have to make him an honorary member, won’t you? Can he pay his initiation fee?” Wolcott asked, with elaborate innocence. Haydock answered by unbuttoning Wolcott’s coat and finding ten dollars in his card-case. “Now sit down and enclose it in a nice little note to Barrows, so that Crœsus can have the satisfaction of paying it himself.” He led Sears by the coat to a desk, and dipped a pen in the ink. “This highway robbery game is a perfect damned outrage!” said The Magnificent One, as he took the pen and began to write. McGaw was bewildered and charmed at his election, for it is a great honour to belong to the Signet, although no one--especially the twenty-one members of the distinguished junior society--knows just why. He was also considerably upset by his unexpected translation; it demolished an entire system of dreary philosophy that he had built out of the struggles and bitterness of his freshman and sophomore years. He couldn’t, logically, go on thinking himself an obscure outcast, shut off from human interests, since he had become so pleasantly conspicuous in the public eye. Some unseen, unknown power had wished him well, and had done much for him; McGaw was happy, grateful, and, at first, mystified. But when the extra ten dollars for his initiation fee came through Barrows, he considered the mystery solved. He prayed enthusiastically that night--a great deal more than ten dollars’ worth--for the hallowed being whose goodness was unfathomable. He also laid awake an hour thinking up a suitable subject for his initiation “part.” Nothing that occurred to him seemed deep enough for so intellectual an institution as the Signet.